The User Journey

One thing I wanted to cover quickly is while WordPress does make it relatively easy for people to register on the site it doesn’t really provide the best user journey.

For example the login pages don’t match the design of the site and there is no obvious register/login/logout links on most WordPress sites.

I also wanted new members to be added to my blogs mailing list.

I spent considerable time tweaking the user journey through trial & error and will show you my personal solutions below.

Planning Your Forums

The first thing you need to do is decide what forums you will offer. You don’t want to be so specific that you end up creating lots of forums that confuse the user, but you don’t want to go to general either.

Aweber Integration

I know it says the plugin hasn’t been updated for a while but it still works!

Once installed go to Settings > Aweber Integration and add your form ID and list name.

If you need help with that follow the instructions at the top of the settings screen.

Redirect After Login

The only place people can login / logout of the site is in the forum sidebar. By default when people login they get taken to the homepage which offers no benefit. Instead they should be taken to the forum.

Going Live!

If everything looks good then it’s time to push your forums live.

What I chose to do was add a link in the main navigation bar that reads ‘Ask A Question’

I positioned this on the far left as it will attract a lot of attention from the eye and if anyone wants to ask me a question they will see that option before reaching the ‘Contact Me’ option which is purposely positioned on the far right (least attention).

This helps to ensure a steady new flow of users and questions while keeping my inbox clear for my clients.

I also added 2 widgets to the sidebar that are visible across the rest of the blog, these are a list of the forums and a list of popular topics.

Peace Out

Well that brings me to the end of the tutorial – your WordPress site should now have a fully functional forum for your visitors to enjoy.

If you get stuck then post a comment or better yet, jump over to the forum

If you use this guide to create a new forum let me know in the comments below and I’ll link it from this post!

It’s the buddypress plugin for WordPress you can check the page source for the div containing forum the forum and google the name=”xxxxxxx” portion [if it’s not obviously staying what the plugin name is already].

Good overview on bbPress integration. Couple of quick questions: was the forum part of the original website development concept or more of an after-thought post-launch? If the latter, would you have opted for another, more well-rounded open source CMS platform or stuck w/WP?

MatthewWoodward.co.uk – good to know; always enjoy others' insights into app usage. While WP offers incredible flexibility, easy installation and administration, always like to hear about others' experiences – load times, user experience, etc. Dabble in several open source platforms and have our own, so feedback can be invaluable. Played w/BuddyPress for a whille, but never used WP in the various ways you have so far.

Quickly tried both on test servers here as a matter of curiousity, and it seemed to work fine, but then that was on a default install. Haven't a clue what you have installed for other plug-ins, which may or may not work well w/this hack.

Nice tutorial Matt. I've built a couple of sites in the past with forums and WordPress on the same domain. Although I've never used BBPress I imagine its quite limited as a board compared to more mainstream scripts like vBulletin, IP Board and phpBB. The way that I built them was to install WordPress on the main domain, and then create a subfolder like – example.com/forum.

I would then create a new database and install the forum into that folder, which gives you two seperate databases and platforms on the same domain. If one of them is hacked or gets corrupted you don't lose both the forum and the WordPress site. The only thing about this method is there are two seperate backends and logins and its not as integrated as the solution you are describing here. There are bridges available for some platforms which will add a user from the forum database to the CMS database and viseversa, but anyone who can code should be able to workaround this problem to prevent your users having to sign up twice, once for each platform. For a simple forum I prefer your method, but for those people who prefer the bigger scripts my method will work to allow you to use WordPress as the CMS.

Anyway, I look out for your emails now and read every one as I know you put effort and thought into your blog posts. Keep up the good work my friend

Yes it is quite limited really and does only offer the basics although you can add a lot of missing functionality via plugins.

Who knows it might come to the point in the future that I will need to move it to a dedicated forum script as it grows but integration is my main concern.

It's a shame that no one has created a bridge to display something like vbulletin within a wordpress theme while still maintaing a proper URL structure – I've seen people iframing it in but its less than ideal.

Good news your looking out for my emails now – that means I'm doing something right =D

How do you get the link at the bottom of your forum pages to "Login or Register". In my installation it only says "you must be logged in to create new topics". There is not link to login or register. I have the login widget for the sidebar but would love that link below the forum posts as well.

P.S. Thanks for the tutorial. Really great and clear instructions. It's helped me out a lot.

Awwww man that was done by hacking one of the BBPress files directly, I cant remember which file it was now but if you just open some up and search for part of the text string you'll find the code and can add the a href stuff around it.

If you find which file it was please update here and I'll add it to the post with credit and a link!

I also cant resolve this problem. The widgets are fine but you need to get user convenience and display it right there what emily white has mentioned and sidebar is rather for ads and your crucial information to minimize the bounce rate. Just let me know how to get that if your problem is resolved ?

I just wanted to add a little tip. If you have trouble with the forum sidebar not displaying correctly, it’s probably because of GD bbpress Tweaks having trouble with your theme, so instead, install the Content Aware Sidebar plugin (but still install GD bbpress Widgets). Works awesome.

Hello Matt, thanks for this great tutorial. I have a small problem please. I use the heatmap lite version theme for my site but i don’t seem to be able to get this forum plugin settings to work. Please is there a way to go around this? Thank you

Regarding the Aweber integration. What happens if somebody registers with your forum but they are already registered on your main email list? Or vise versa! Does it recognise this or do you have 2 seperate aweber lists that contain duplicate contacts?

I have gotten aweber integrated, and when a test email registers in the forum it shows their name and email information in the plug in, but no confirmation email is being sent by aweber, just one from my wordpress site, and none of the test emails are being added to my aweber account.

actually it looks like I am having this problem with only one username and not the others, maybe my assistant is logged in under the same one? IDK, will wait on it tomorrow, at least the others work. if you have any ideas let me know

I have run into the exact same issue. If you could let me know how you resolved it that would be great. Unfortunately for me I only have one login to the site, so I have no access to my site at all at this stage.

Hi Matthew,
with regard to the forum, I m not sure atm if I should put it on an external domain (edm) or on a subdomain / folder of my current domain. I think I ll probably put it on the external domain as I m a little bit affraid with regard to possible negative ranking effects for the whole site, e.g. when the content in the forum might be thin (from google perspective) or if it would produce a lot of urls or will affect the main-site on the domain in other seo-relevant ways – its more or less a gut feeling I have that it might be better to seperate it by domain. what do you think … did you consider putting it on another domain before?
cheers joe

Hi there! Do you know if they make any plugins to assist with
Search Engine Optimization? I’m trying to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m not seeing very good results.
If you know of any please share. Thanks!

Thank you for posting this. I never thought of using forums as an addition to a WP blog. I have a couple of forums (private ones) but I simply got a domain then installed a forum on there from my cpanel. From there I learned how to do what I wanted by my tried and tested formula of pushing every button in sight and seeing what it did. They’re good enough as they are now. My main problem was finding how to add a password for entry, which probably shows the state of my brain.

However I do want to mention one thing about your forum. I joined a while back and I remember later trying to get back on to your forum but I couldn’t find it. I eventually went back to my records and found from there I had to add ‘/forum’ to your home page URL.

Your ‘ask a question’ category was one I overlooked as I record the pages of anything I find interesting in my own library under the categories I find useful. So basically, if I haven’t recorded a URL |I will go to the ‘forum’ tag and search from there. Except you don’t have a ‘forum’ tag. I realize now, from your post, you’ve called it ‘ask a question’, a category I looked at but never explored.

This is a minor point and I did find a work around. Just thought you might want to know.

Yes my inbox does receive a lot of spam, but I remember setting up a forum quite some time ago with a domain name I was not using and I got loads of subscribers but it was just pure Spam, worse than what you are getting in our inbox. That is why I was asking. But will try to set up a forum.

Hey there! I know this is kind off off topic buut I
was wondering if you knew where I could locate a captcha plugin for
my comment form? I’m using the same bllog platform as yours and I’m
having trouble finding one? Thanks a lot!

I’d love to add this to my site, but I’m worried about all the plugins – adding what you suggest above is an extra 6 over my current 21. Everything I read tells me to avoid plugins as far as possible because they slow the site.
What do you think?
I have no idea how to fix site speed so could this really makes things drag?

OK, so I’m working on my new forum. I’ve opened up the site to subscribers and although my forum isn’t published yet and there are no links on the site to register, I’m getting inundated with new ‘subscribers’ to the site! Hundreds already.
How are they signing up, and who are these people? They aren’t signing up to the forum because its not there yet, so it seems like they must be some kind of spammers or hackers. Feeling worried!